DON'T BE AN IDIOT

Hat tip: Gateway Pundit

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Sheriff Joe's Job...

How much government waste and fraud has Sheriff Joe Biden uncovered -- how many tens of billions of dollars?

We want to know what his next move is going to be with the fraud and waste connected with SOLYNDRA. (See post by Andrew McCarthy below).

Come on Sheriff Joe, we want some indictments, we want to hear the rattling of cuffs and chains, and we want to see a perp walk.

We haven't forgotten that President Obama appointed you to be the new Sheriff in town.

Come on Sheriff Joe... where the heck are ya?

From the White House.gov website:

The White House Blog

There's a New Sheriff in Town

Posted by Katelyn Sabochik on June 13, 2011 at 01:44 PM EDT

Today, Vice President Joe Biden sent the email below to the White House email list announcing the new Campaign to Cut Waste - an effort to root out wasteful spending at every agency and department in the Federal Government.

If you didn't get the email, be sure to sign up for the White House email list.

Did you know that the government spends millions to maintain buildings that have sat vacant for years? Or that your tax dollars pay to needlessly ship copies of the Federal Register to thousands of government offices across the country even though the same information is available online?

And I bet you didn't know that your tax dollars pay for a website dedicated to the Desert Tortoise. I'm sure it's a wonderful species, but we can't afford to have a standalone site devoted to every member of the animal kingdom. It's just one of hundreds of government websites that should be consolidated or eliminated.

This kind of waste is just unacceptable. Particularly at a time when we’re facing tough decisions about reducing our deficit, it's a no-brainer to stop spending taxpayer dollars on things that benefit nobody.

That’s why President Obama asked me to head up the Campaign to Cut Waste—a new effort to root out wasteful spending at every agency and department in the Federal Government.



Like millions of American families, the Federal Government has to take a hard look at spending and live within its means. Most of these cuts we’re going to make are small. They won’t close our deficit or solve all of our fiscal problems. However, no amount of waste is acceptable, and these cuts will add up over time. This year alone we’ve found $33 billion in savings, but we know there’s a lot more work to be done.

When we passed the Recovery Act back in 2009, President Obama insisted that we use that program to set a new standard in government transparency and accountability. And he appointed me as “Sheriff Joe” to make sure the job gets done.

Now, there were a lot of naysayers back then who said that there was no way we could implement the Recovery Act without massive waste, fraud and abuse.

You know what? They were wrong. Thanks to our diligence (and some help from advanced computer models and sophisticated data analysis), the Recovery Act has had an unprecedentedly low level of fraud, with less than 0.6% of all awards experiencing any waste or abuse.

There’s absolutely no reason why we can’t apply these same principles and techniques to all government spending.

And that’s exactly what I intend to do with the help of a new Government Accountability and Transparency Board, a group composed of independent inspectors general and high-level agency officials who will help me root out waste, fraud and abuse across the government. Helping me ensure that your tax dollars are being spent on things that matter, like investments in education, innovation and improving our infrastructure.

So, folks, we’re changing the way your government does business (and spends your hard-earned tax dollars), and I think you’re going to like the results.

Sincerely,

Vice President Joe Biden

P.S. If you’re interested in keeping up with our progress in hunting down wasteful spending, you can sign up for regular email updates.

A Carbuncle is Growing on The Presidency...

This post is co-written by Dave and Andrea.

...and it’s about to burst. (Thanks to Dan Friedman of NYC for sending this piece by McCarthy).

So where is Congress? Where is the Tea Party darling Sen. Orrin Hatch? Where has he been all along? I don't mean to pick on the Honorable Senator from Utah, because he's not the only one sucking on his thumb. But he's symptomatic of the problem we have inside the beltway. Suckers.

So, as Victoria Jackson asks at the end of her song "There's a Communist Living in the White House!" -- WHADDYA GONNA DO ABOUT IT?

Boehner? McConnell? Where are these leaders. Howcome somebody isn't being put in handcuffs right now?

Handcuffs are for criminals. These guys in Congress are not criminals. there's another word for these guys in Congress --- "elected officials". The sons o' bitches.

Who's big enough in Congress to take on the current White House regime? Want the answer? NO ONE. No one is big enough. Hillary might be able to pull it off... after all she does have brass ones. Too bad she's on the wrong side of what's Right.

NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE, September 17, 2011

The Solyndra Fraud

The solar-energy company was a con game.

By Andrew C. McCarthy

The Solyndra debacle is not just Obama-style crony socialism as usual. It is a criminal fraud. That is the theory that would be guiding any competent prosecutor’s office in the investigation of a scheme that cost victims — in this case, American taxpayers — a fortune.

Fraud against the United States is one of the most serious felony offenses in the federal penal law. It is even more serious than another apparent Solyndra violation that has captured congressional attention: the Obama administration’s flouting of a statute designed to protect taxpayers.

Homing in on one of the several shocking aspects of the Solyndra scandal, lawmakers noted that, a few months before the “clean energy” enterprise went belly-up last week, the Obama Energy Department signed off on a sweetheart deal. In the event of bankruptcy — the destination to which it was screamingly obvious Solyndra was headed despite the president’s injection of $535 million in federal loans — the cozily connected private investors would be given priority over American taxpayers. In other words, when the busted company’s assets were sold off, Obama pals would recoup some of their losses, while you would be left holding the half-billion-dollar bag.

As Andrew Stiles reported here at NRO, Republicans on the Oversight and Investigations subcommittee say this arrangement ran afoul of the Energy Policy Act of 2005. This law — compassionate conservatism in green bunting — is a monstrosity, under which Leviathan, which can’t run a post office, uses your money to pick winners and losers in the economy’s energy sector. The idea is cockamamie, but Congress did at least write in a mandate that taxpayers who fund these “investments” must be prioritized over other stakeholders. The idea is to prevent cronies from pushing ahead of the public if things go awry — as they are wont to do when pols fancy themselves venture capitalists.

On the Energy Policy Act, the administration’s malfeasance is significant, but secondary. That’s because the act is not a penal statute. It tells the cabinet officials how to structure these “innovative technology” loans, but it provides no remedy if Congress’s directives are ignored.

The criminal law, by contrast, is not content to assume the good faith of government officials. It targets anyone — from low-level swindlers to top elective officeholders — who attempts to influence the issuance of government loans by making false statements; who engages in schemes to defraud the United States; or who conspires “to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof, in any manner or for any purpose.” The penalties are steep: Fraud in connection with government loans, for example, can be punished by up to 30 years in the slammer.

Although Solyndra was a private company, moreover, it was using its government loans as a springboard to go public. When the sale of securities is involved, federal law criminalizes fraudulent schemes, false statements of material fact, and statements that omit any “material fact necessary in order to make the statements made . . . not misleading.” And we’re not just talking about statements made in required SEC filings. Any statement made to deceive the market can be actionable. In 2003, for example, the Justice Department famously charged Martha Stewart with securities fraud. Among other allegations, prosecutors cited public statements she had made in press releases and at a conference for securities analysts — statements in which she withheld damaging information in an effort to inflate the value of her corporation and its stock.

That’s exactly what President Obama did on May 26, 2010, with his Solyndra friends about to launch their initial public offering of stock. The solar-panel company’s California factory was selected as the fitting site for a presidential speech on the virtues of confiscating taxpayer billions to prop up pie-in-the-sky clean-energy businesses.

By then, the con game was already well under way. Solyndra had first tried to get Energy Act funding during the Bush administration, but had been rebuffed shortly before President Bush left office. Small wonder: Solyndra, as former hedge-fund manager Bruce Krasting concluded, was “an absolute complete disaster.” Its operating expenses, including supply costs, nearly doubled its revenue in 2009 — and that’s without factoring in capital expenditures and other costs in what, Krasting observes, is a “low margin” industry. The chance that Solyndra would ever become profitable was essentially nonexistent, particularly given that solar-panel competitors backed by China produce energy at drastically lower prices.

Yet, as Stiles reports, within six days of Obama’s taking office, an Energy Department official acknowledged that the Solyndra “approval process” was suddenly being considered anew. Eventually, the administration made Solyndra the very first recipient of a public loan guarantee when the Energy Act program was beefed up in 2009 — just part of nearly a trillion dollars burned through under the Obama stimulus.

For a while after Solyndra tanked, the administration stonewalled the House subcommittee’s investigation, but we now know that minions in the Energy Department and the Office of Management and Budget had enormous qualms about the Solyndra loan. They realized that the company was hemorrhaging money and, even with the loan, would lack the necessary working capital to turn that equation around. Yet they caved under White House pressure to sign off in time for Vice President Joe Biden to make a ballyhooed announcement of the loan in September 2009. An OMB e-mail laments that the timing of the loan approval was driven by the politics of the announcement “rather than the other way around.”

Why so much pressure to give half a billion dollars to a doomed venture? The administration insists it had nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that Solyndra’s big backers include the George Kaiser Family Foundation. No, of course not. George Kaiser, an Oklahoma oil magnate, just happens to be a major Obama fundraiser who bundled oodles in contributions for the president’s 2008 campaign. Solyndra officers and investors are said to have visited the White House no fewer than 20 times while the loan guarantee was being considered and, later, revised. Kaiser, too, made several visits — but not to worry: Both he and administration officials deny any impropriety. You’re to believe that the White House was just turning up the heat on OMB and DOE because Solyndra seemed like such a swell investment.

Except it didn’t seem so swell to people who knew how to add and subtract, and those people weren’t all at OMB and DOE. Flush with confidence that their mega-loan from Uncle Sam would make the company attractive to private investors, Solyndra’s backers prepared to take the company public. Unfortunately, SEC rules for an initial public offering of stock require the disclosure of more than Obama speeches glowing with solar power. Companies that want access to the market have to reveal their financial condition.

In Solyndra’s case, outside auditors from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) found that condition to be dire. “The company has suffered recurring losses from operations, negative cash flows since inception, and has a net stockholders’ deficit,” the PWC accountants concluded. Even with the gigantic Obama loan, Solyndra was such a basket case that PWC found “substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern.”

The “going concern” language is not boilerplate. As Townhall finance maven John Ransom explains, it is a term of art to which auditors resort when there is an extraordinary need to protect themselves and the company from legal liability. Angry investors who’ve lost their shirts tend to scapegoat the loser company’s accountants. In truth, even if the accountants affixed a neon “going concern” sign to the company’s financial statements, investors would have no one but themselves to blame. But it is unusual: The language is absent from the statements of many companies that actually end up going bankrupt. Auditors reserve it for the hopeless causes — like Solyndra.

With no alternative if they wanted to make a play for market financing, Solyndra’s backers disclosed the auditors’ bleak diagnosis in March 2010. The government had thus been aware of it for two months when President Obama made his May 26 Solyndra speech — the speech Solyndra backers were clearly hoping would mitigate the damage.

As president, Obama had a fiduciary responsibility to be forthright about Solyndra’s grim prospects — in speaking to the American taxpayers whose money he had redistributed, and to the American investors who were about to be solicited for even more funding. Instead, he pulled a Martha Stewart.

The president looked us in the eye and averred that, when it came to channeling public funds into private hands, “We can see the positive impacts right here at Solyndra.” He bragged that the $535 billion loan had enabled the company to build the state-of-the-art factory in which he was then speaking. He said nothing about how Solyndra was continuing to lose money — public money — at a catastrophic pace. Instead, he painted the brightest of pictures: 3,000 construction workers to build the thriving plant; manufacturers in 22 states building an endless stream of supplies; technicians in a dozen states constructing the advanced equipment that would make the factory hum; and Solyndra fully “expect[ing] to hire a thousand workers to manufacture solar panels and sell them across America and around the world.”

Not content with that rosy portrait, the president further predicted a “ripple effect”: Solyndra would “generate business for companies throughout our country who will create jobs supplying this factory with parts and materials.” Sure it would. The auditors had scrutinized Solyndra and found it to have, from its inception, a fatally flawed business model that was hurtling toward collapse. Obama touted it as a redistribution success story that would be rippling jobs, growth, and spectacular success for the foreseeable future.

It was a breathtaking misrepresentation. Happily, it proved insufficient to dupe investors who, unlike taxpayers, get to choose where their money goes. They stacked what the administration was saying against what the PWC auditors were saying and wisely went with PWC. Solyndra had to pull its initial public offering due to lack of interest.

But fraud doesn’t have to be fully successful to be a fraud, and this one still had another chapter to go. As the IPO failed and the company inevitably sank in a sea of red ink, Solyndra’s panicked backers pleaded with the administration to restructure the loan terms — to insulate them from their poor business judgment, allowing them to recoup some of their investment while the public took the fall.

It should go without saying that the duty of soi-disant public servants is to serve the public. In this instance, the proper course was clear. As structured, the loan gave the public first dibs on Solyndra’s assets if it collapsed, and, as we’ve seen, the law requires it. There was no good reason to contemplate a change.

In addition, as Andrew Stiles relates, OMB had figured out that there was no economic sense in restructuring: Solyndra was heading for bankruptcy anyway, and an immediate liquidation would net the government a better deal — about $170 million better. The case for leaving things where they stood was so palpable that OMB openly feared “questions will be asked” if DOE proceeded with an unjustifiable restructuring. So, with numbing predictability, the Obama administration proceeded with an unjustifiable restructuring. In exchange for lending some of their own money and thus buying more time, Solyndra officials were given priority over taxpayers with respect to the first $75 million in the event of a bankruptcy — the event all the insiders and government officials could see coming from the start, and that hit the rest of us like a $535 billion thunderbolt last week.

The administration’s rationalization is priceless. According to DOE officials, the restructuring was necessary “to create a situation whereby investors felt there was a value in their investment.” Of course, the value in an investment is the value created by the business in which the investment is made. Here, Solyndra had no value. Investors could be enticed only by an invalid arrangement to recoup some of their losses — by a scheme to make the public an even bigger sap.

The word for such schemes is fraud.

Andrew C. McCarthy is a former Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

Waiting on a Bone Marrow Transplant.

Dear Friends,

Many of you have been praying for Dave's recovery, and for that he is appreciative.

He's asked me to update you on his condition. As you know if you've read the previous posts linked below, Dave's been fighting what's known as Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia for several years. Last year he began a clinical trial with drug maker Novartis, using Tasigna, a relatively new drug with promising results. Without getting too technical, this drug prevents the bone marrow from overproducing the white blood cells that literally crowd out the red blood cells we all need to live.

For reasons yet unknown, Dave's disease became quite aggressive in the past several weeks, causing him a great deal of fatigue and discomfort as the CML shifted from "chronic" to "acute".

Since he was admitted into UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento three weeks ago, Dave has been undergoing extensive tests for a bone marrow transplant. His oncologists are searching for an appropriate match in the bone marrow donor database and as soon as one is found, the transplant will take place.

Meanwhile, his immune system is virtually non-existent and he's being kept in an isolation unit. Visitors must gown up as thoroughly as an OR surgeon to ensure Dave is not exposed to any bacteria, virus, or germ that could complicate his condition.

Dave doesn't yet have his personal computer with him, but we're hoping that will change very soon. He's looking forward to getting back online and emailing with you!

We will keep you posted as soon as there's something new to report. Thank you for your emails (send to him in care of me at: Radiopatriot@gmail.com), phone calls and prayers. You have no idea how much they cheer him.

Here are the previous posts by Dave about CML

TWD Update: UC Davis Cancer Center, Tasigna and CML - July 29, 2010

TWD UPDATE PT. 2: TASIGNA + 30 DAYS - Sept. 8, 2010

TWD UPDATE PT 3: CML, TASIGNA + 60 DAYS - Nov. 7, 2010

Scroll down to read my last two reports.

Bone Marrow Biopsy

Hi everyone,

On Tuesday, Dave underwent a bone marrow biopsy.

That's a procedure where a needle (tube) is inserted into the pelvic bone near the hip area, and marrow is extracted for analysis. Yes, it sounds uncomfortable, and it was. But the docs had Dave pretty well medicated, and for the most part he was awake and aware and apprised of what was going on every step of the way. That was at his request. The procedure took about 45 minutes.

Dave is awaiting the lab results, and once he finds out we will let you know what the course of treatment will consist of. One possibility is that he will remain in the hospital for several weeks while undergoing chemotherapy to battle the leukemia.

He's mentally up for it, and is ready to do battle.

That's it for now. When we learn more, I'll post it here. Your prayers are always appreciated.

Andrea

Update on Dave

Dear friends,

Dave has asked me to post this for his readers who have probably noticed that he hasn't posted a blog since mid-August. He's asked me to tell you the reason why.

As many of you know, Dave has been battling leukemia since he was first diagnosed with the disease in 2007. He's still battling this blood disorder that causes his bone marrow to create way too many white blood cells, strangling the production of the red cells needed to be healthy.

Dave hasn't felt well for several weeks and the reason is his disease has -- as he put it -- "flipped a switch" and has become particularly aggressive.

Dave is getting the care and treatment he needs to battle what was originally diagnosed as Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia. Tomorrow he is scheduled to have a bone marrow biopsy so the doctors who are treating him will have a better understanding of what they're up against. That will in turn, determine the treatment Dave will undergo in an effort to return him back to health.

Please keep Dave in your prayers as he travels this road. He is a valiant warrior in the defense of our great nation, and he will need the same determination to beat back the leukemia that wants to ravage his body.

You can leave him messages here in the comment section, or email them to me at Radiopatriot@gmail.com, or send cards or notes directly to him at:

Wm. David Logan
c/o UC Davis Medical Center
4501 X Street
Sacramento, CA 95817

Thank you.

Andrea Shea King
The Radio Patriot